General Milan writes about financial technology and cryptocurrency for the Earth Alliance, a loose-knit global alliance working for the benefit of humanity. The battle over the future of Planet Earth has in many ways always been a financial battle. As time passes and technology advances, that financial battle is increasingly being fought out in the cryptocurrency arena.
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In early December of 2017, just before cryptocurrency markets started to crater, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela announced the creation of the Petro cryptocurrency backed by Venezuela’s oil and gas reserves. This was both an attempt to both circumvent the financial sanctions placed on the Maduro regime and a desperate effort to patch up the Venezuelan economy, the complete collapse of which was an entirely predictable outcome of Venezuela’s decades-long experiment with authoritarian socialism.
In this article we trace the development of the Petro from Maduro, to his Russian cryptocurrency consultants, to the Japanese/Malaysian blockchain technology upon which the Petro is based, all the way back to the Esalen Institute of California—the heart and center of socialist ideology.
Venezuela has quickly gone from being one of the richest countries in South America with the largest proven oil reserves in the world, to having a humanitarian refugee crisis on par with the war in Syria. As in almost all cases of mass human suffering, very dark forces are behind it, and indeed the oil industry itself is obviously at the heart and center of many wars and global environmental problems.
The story of the Petro is far from over, however, and the real battle over the financial future of Planet Earth is probably still just beginning. In this, the happenings in Venezuela have major geopolitical implications.
On August 5th, 2018 President Maduro was the target of of an apparent assassination attempt by drone, a bizarre false flag-ish event that was seemingly produced on a very modest budget.
Then, on September 8th, 2018 The New York Times ran an exposé describing how officials from the Trump administration had met with opposition forces in Venezuela to plan a potential coup against Maduro. The article can be seen as both a critique of the Trump administration’s tactics and as a form of support for Maduro’s claim that he a “good guy” battling against imperial American forces.
We expect the geopolitical battle to continue in the weeks and months ahead, but for now our focus is on the Petro cryptocurrency. In fact it remains to be seen whether or not the Petro is successful in any way. On August 30th, 2018, Reuters ran a special investigative report entitled “In Venezuela, new cryptocurrency is nowhere to be found.” The report describes the fact that the Petro is based on oil reserves located underneath a barren patch of land that would require an investment of at least $20 billion to retrieve, money that the bankrupt Venezuelan government does not have.
Thus, in many ways the Petro is nothing but a pipe dream. The article quotes the exiled former Venezuelan Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez as saying, “The Petro is being set at an arbitrary value which exists only in the government’s imagination.”
The Petro is based on the NEM blockchain. The idea for NEM originally came from a Bitcointalk user named UtopianFuture, but NEM was developed by an Osaka company called Tech Bureau, led by a character named Takao Asayama. The NEM Foundation is domiciled in Singapore and physically located in the oil-rich nation of Malaysia.
Takao Asayama is said to be closely connected to Takafumi Horie, a notorious character in Japan who is deeply connected into the Asian underworld. Horie is a kind of a Japanese Elon Musk—an aggressive technology businessman who was criticized for his M&A practices and actually went to jail for market manipulation tactics. It’s said that when Horie went into jail he may have been “grey,” but when he came out he was fully “black” and 60 pounds lighter. Horie is the founder of a rocket company called Interstellar Technologies which has unfortunately experienced two failed launches.
The logo for NEM is a combination of counterclockwise-rotating Japanese mitsudomoe symbol and a shield representing the Reuleaux triangle shape used inside of the internal combustion engine. NEM stands for New Economy Movement, not to be confused with the New Economic Model (NEM), an affirmative action plan developed by the former Malaysian prime minister and the Malaysian Chinese Association.
The NEM cryptocurrency is based on a consensus algorithm called Proof-of-Importance, which is an attempt to improve upon the rich-get-richer characteristics of Proof-of-Stake algorithms. In Proof-of-Importance, accounts are assigned a “reputation” or “importance” score, such that accounts that are deemed to be more important to the NEM ecosystem are awarded with more new currency units. We fear that over time NEM’s consensus algorithm may need to be renamed Proof-of-Maduro’s-Importance.
NEM was at the center of the Coincheck hack of January 2018. In that event, hackers broke into a Japanese cryptocurrency exchange called Coincheck and stole over $500 million dollars worth of NEM, making it one of the largest thefts in the history of the world. The hack cast a pall over the cryptocurrency market in Japan and contributed to the global sell-off that became the cryptocurrency bear market of 2018. The hack also reduced the number of exchanges trading NEM in Japan to only one—the Zaif exchange owned by Tech Bureau itself.
In March 2018, the Japanese FSA issued a business improvement order to Zaif and several other exchanges over their security and anti-money-laundering practices. This put Zaif and NEM in the awkward position of being close to complete shutdown in Japan.
Then on September 20th 2018, Zaif announced that it had been hacked to the tune of $60 million, but also announced that a bailout loan was being arranged through a Horie-connected Japanese investment advisory firm called FISCO. As part of the deal, FISCO would take a majority share ownership in Zaif. Since FISCO already operates its own cryptocurrency exchange in Japan and is already partnered with Zaif, the bailout could be seen as a way for FISCO to subsume Zaif and start fresh with a clean regulatory record.
Just one day after the Zaif hack was announced, cryptocurrency investors were left scratching their heads as the price of the Ripple cryptocurrency surged by more than 60%. But as one Twitter user keenly noted, “Anyone attempting to explain this Ripple move should also explain why Monacoin is up roughly the same amount.” In fact, Monacoin, billed as “the first Japanese cryptocurrency,” was among the cryptocurrencies stolen in the Zaif hack. If the hackers of the Zaif exchange wanted to unload their stolen Monacoin, it would make a lot of sense to pump up the price first.
But back to the topic of the Petro, how and why did Maduro decide to base the Petro on the NEM blockchain? After all, Venezuela is a world away from Japan. To answer that question, we need to look at some of Maduro’s cryptocurrency advisors.
The first character of interest is the 27-year-old Venezuelan Gabriel Jimenez. After Jimenez’s father was charged for defrauding investors in the collapse of a Dominican bank, Jimenez went to work in Washington, D.C. as a congressional intern for one of Maduro’s strongest critics. In that role he was a “spirited anti-government crusader who helped organize a caravan … in which thousands of Venezuelan exiles traveled by bus to Washington to pressure the Obama administration to slap sanctions on Maduro’s government.” But soon after, he returned to Venezuela and quickly rose to become one of the top strategists behind the Petro. We can only assume that he is either a spy or a complete sell-out. In any case, to find the real masterminds behind the Petro we need to look farther afield, to Maduro’s Russian consultants.
In March 2018 after President Trump issued an Executive Order banning Americans from transacting in the Petro, Time Magazine published an exclusive article entitled “Russia Secretly Helped Venezuela Launch a Cryptocurrency to Evade U.S. Sanctions.” Of course, as with all mainstream media articles about Russia, it is mostly an attempt to demonize Russia and link everything back to Putin, which is a little bit like saying that Trump controls everything that happens in the United States. The author’s other Time articles include “To Understand Russia, Read A Terrible Country” and “How I Learned to Love the German Nanny State After Leaving Putin’s Russia.”
In any case, the Time article does a good job of detailing the Russian consultants behind the Petro. It’s worth noting here that the symbol for the Petro, ₽, is exactly the same as the symbol for the Russian Ruble that was newly chosen in 2013 via a process organized by the Central Bank of Russia.
The main two Russian consultants behind the Petro are Fyodor Bogorodsky and Denis Druzhkov. According to the Time article, “Bogorodsky moved to Uruguay around 2009 and became an informal ambassador of Russian culture across Latin America.” Bogorodsky’s personal website details his family’s long history in Russia from its beginnings among “eminent Tatars,” to “military service in the Crimea campaign,” to the development of banking in Kazan province. Bogorodsky’s contributions to Maduro were apparently run out of a shell company called Aerotrading, which is only really notable for using the Illuminati left-facing OK sign as its logo.
Denis Druzhkov is the co-founder of a Russian cryptocurrency exchange called the Zeus Exchange. We note here that Zeus was not known to be a kind god. The Zeus Exchange is based on the NEM blockchain and is partnered with the NEM Foundation.
Druzhkov’s Twitter account is enlightening. He is a follower of the Latvia-based anti-Kremlin news agency Meduza, named after the snake-headed monster from Greek mythology. He is also a follower of “the Kremlin’s leading critic-in-exile” Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who looted Russia’s oil industry after the fall of the Soviet Union and a close colleague of Henry Kissinger and Jacob Rothschild. Druzhkov also follows Shaltai Boltai, an anonymous hacking group that targets the Kremlin. Needless to say, Time appears to have been completely wrong in portraying Druzhkov and Bogorodsky as puppets of the Kremlin.
Druzhkov is also a Twitter follower of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. It is worth digging into this relationship a little bit, because readers may not be aware of the Esalen Institute’s prominent position in the global Satanic hierarchy. But remember that while the 60’s produced a lot of love, freedom, and liberation, it also produced horrible events such as the Manson family’s murder of Luciferian movie stars, all of whom hung out around Esalen.
According to The Magic of Esalen: “At its essence, Esalen culture is organized almost like a Masonic Lodge or Secret Society, with concentric orders of initiation and status.” In fact, Esalen was influential enough during the Cold War to have arranged United States visits via its Soviet-American exchange program for several prominent Russians just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. This included a visit for one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s chief economic advisors, and also included Boris Yeltsin’s first trip to the United States to meet with George H.W. Bush and other political leaders. We wonder if the Esalen Institute would be as welcoming to Vladamir Putin today; somehow we doubt it. Those interested in reading more about the history of Esalen are encouraged to take a look at “How Darwin, Huxley, and the Esalen Institute Launched the Psychedelic Revolutions” or the associated map.
Following President Trump’s executive order banning the Petro, the Zeus Exchange appears to have cut ties with Druzkov, at least nominally. But having structured at least two major projects around NEM (the Zeus Exchange and the Petro), it is a safe bet that Druzkov and colleagues still are heavily invested in NEM and perhaps even actively promoting it.
Indeed, NEM has been making headway among some interesting groups. In August, at the 100th Annual Crow Fair for the Crow Nation of Montana, NEM systems were demonstrated to tribal leaders: “Good Guy NEM? – Helping Native Americans Get into Crypto! – Great Idea!” The Crow Nation—or the Black Lodges, as one of its subgroups is called—is located in a major oil-producing region, but NEM’s interest in collaborating with the Crow likely also extends to the tribal casino business.
Historically, the Crow tribe worked together with the U.S. Army against their enemies the Lakota Sioux. This is notable in the sense that the Lakota Standing Rock reservation was major news in recent years due to protests over the Dakota Access oil pipeline. We have a feeling that the Lakota would not be as eager as the Crow to embrace using a cryptocurrency with deep ties to the oil industry.
Further south in Las Vegas, NEM recently signed an informal agreement with Kind Heaven, a new multimedia theatrical experience created by Peretz Bernstein, a.k.a. Perry Farrell, the frontman of the rock bands Porno for Pyros and Jane’s Addiction. Taking a page from The Hangover film series or even the Vietnam War, the event will be Southeast Asia-themed, complete with betting on virtual monkey wrestling: Inside Perry Farrell’s Wild Vegas EDM Musical: Sex, Drugs and War. It will also run exclusively on cryptocurrency.
Another project building on NEM is Eterly, the “artificial intelligence platform for life extension.” The logo for Eterly looks like the symbol for a biohazard. We could go on, but you get the idea….
To summarize, while the Venezuelan Petro may collapse into a failed experiment, the cryptocurrency upon which it is based, NEM, is slowly seething its way into the oil and gambling industries and beyond. The two most important commodities in the world are gold and oil.
Money has historically been backed by gold, but that ended in 1971 when Kissinger and Nixon detached the U.S. dollar from gold, and attached it instead to an oil and military agreement involving Saudi Arabia and Israel–the origin of the petrodollar. The result has been the greatest debt bubble in human history, a global environmental catastrophe, and non-stop war in the Middle East. Clearly, the days of the petrodollar are numbered, but nefarious forces are already experimenting with creating new forms of petro-currency.
Gold is created through the super-energetic collapse and collision of stars. Oil, known as black gold, comes from deep within the Earth. While gold has been very useful as the basis of money throughout human history, and while a return to the gold standard would go a long way toward preventing bankers and politicians from printing too much money and giving it to themselves to wage endless warfare, the real problem with the financial system is the centralization of control over the creation and distribution of money. To put it another way, even under the gold standard, the central banks are still in control of the creation and distribution of money and generally have the power to debase their currencies when it suits them to do so.
What is really needed is a new economic system where the power to create and distribute money is truly decentralized, or in other words, put back into the hands of the people. Bitcoin was a major innovation, but it replaces control by banks with a strange new system where all new money is rewarded to those with access to cheap computers and electricity, which happens to be a few people in China.
To understand the real potential for cryptocurrency as a new method of currency creation and distribution, we recommend the excellent article “Why Everyone Missed the Most Mind-Blowing Feature of Cryptocurrency.” NEM was an attempt to create this kind of next-generation cryptocurrency, but it is flawed and is completely controlled by nefarious forces in any case.
Rest assured, alternatives are being created. For now, we can only advise the citizens of Venezuela as well as the rest of the world to avoid both the Petro and NEM like the Black Plague.
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